


We Wear Our Skin (to keep the metal in)

by Moorishflower



Series: The Lost Meteor [2]
Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, Childhood, Disturbing Themes, F/F, F/M, Multi, Parenthood, Parents & Children, Polyamory, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-16
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-12 01:37:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/805634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sburb's meteors go astray, the Beta kids end up in the hands of the Ancestors, rather than the Guardians. It goes somewhat better than can be expected.</p><p>Or, adventures on the high seas, with Jade and Marquise Spinneret Mindfang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Wear Our Skin (to keep the metal in)

She calls you ‘Mindy’ and ‘Spinneret’ in turns, the only creature alive that you allow to do so, and she is vicious and heartfelt and _yours_. You raised her from a freakish, pink, soft-skinned grub, you recreated her in your image, crafted her parts that were stronger, better, faster, and where you weren’t savvy enough you paid or threatened others into doing it for you. You took her eye and gave her a facsimile of your own, pulled it from the root and grafted the tender nerves to black-gold wires and winking red glass; six optical sensors ringed around the tattered remains of her alien pupil, always one less than you, because you’re competitive like that, but no less _powerful_. She is your own, your one and only, hatchmates, business partners, the closest you have ever felt to true pity for anything, alive or dead.

You look at her and you see a mirror of your greatness, your magnanimity and your terror and your fist of iron.

You don’t know what she sees when she looks at you. Her mind is inscrutable, even to your powers, and you don’t know if you screwed the barkbeast on that one by exposing her too often when she was a wiggler, or if it was always meant to be this way. The one creature on Alternia that you pity, that you cherish, that you would rip down the sky and craft it into a cloak to keep her warm, and you will never truly know if she feels anything for you other than fond amusement.

You share everything with her. Your ship, your food, your clothes, if she’s of a mind. And when she looks longingly at the helm, you share that with her, too. And she, in turn, shares all she has with you: her rifles, her smile, her conquests. When she maims an indigoblood rival for scuffing your deck, you pat her head and tell her “Good girl.” When she buys you a new coat, with money she plundered herself, you reward her with a kiss.

Everything you are, everything you own, is hers as well. You are inseparable. She slings her arm around your shoulders and calls the pair of you the ‘Scourge Sisters.’ You don’t know what that word means, or where she learned it, but it fits. It’s perfect. _She_ is perfect.

And she is so like you that sometimes it is worrying. When Dualscar maneuvers his ship alongside yours to trade cannon-fire and barbed insults, you watch as she clips the tail of his idiotic, prancing lusus, deliberate in her aim and her joy at the spray of violet-dark blood across Dualscar’s deck. He shrieks at her across the divide, stormwinds washing his voice pale and ineffective, but she stares across to him and she grins and she _winks_ , with her one, green eye, and she pulls a firecharge from her arm and kisses it before she turns and deliberately tosses it over her shoulder. Heedless of where it actually lands, so long as it does some damage.

You realize you’ve never actually _explained_ to her the quadrants, how they work or what they even are; everything she’s learned has been through observation, and observation of you, no less. You’re aware that your kismessitude with Dualscar isn’t the healthiest example, but it works, and has always worked, and so you’ve never seen a reason to change it. Now, you wait until Dualscar has had his fun, wait until he orders the flames on his ship put out and then sails like a ponce off into the sunrise, and then you bring her into your cabin and you tell her, “Jade, m’darling, dearest, was that a twinkle of pitch I saw in your fair eye?”

She fiddles with the storage panel on her arm, opening and closing the fingers, metallic and cool when you gently take them and force her to stop. The graft is new, unlike her eye, and she’s still getting used to all of the things that she can do now that she couldn’t before. Hidden compartments for poisoned needles, firecharges, bombs, an ammunition dispenser, fingertips to deliver electric jolts and, in the cradle of her wrist, a built-in gun with two chambers: a bullet for her enemy, and, should the need ever arise, a bullet for herself.

“I realize I never did tell you the workings of the hearts and spades, lass, but I’m thinking now is as good a time as any.” And so you sit her down on the edge of your recuperacoon and explain to her the concupiscent quadrants, the drones that she will never need to worry about, the slurry she will never produce. She lacks the equipment, but far be it for you, of all trolls, to deny her the pleasures found in flesh. You outline for her the traits of kismessitude, and then, haltingly, moirallegiance, and matespritship, neither of which you have experience with (yet, _yet_ ). She listens and nods gravely in all the right places, save for when you tell her that Dualscar is _your_ kismesis, and you will insure his death should he choose to go tramping off with someone else. Yes, even you, my darling, even you.

And she looks at you with her pupil-ringed eye and her green eye, and you can see the wires beneath her skin, where the graft took hold and accepted her as its own. As much organic as she is robotic, her body treats the modifications like extensions of itself: her eye, her arm, the host of organs modified, replaced, upgraded, her skeleton metal-coated, her blood-pusher reinforced, and still when she looks at you like that you see not a machine, as she has been called by your enemies, but the single greatest thing that has ever happened to you.

She says, “Why can’t we share?” and you are reminded of why she is dangerous, why all her happy malice and her rifles and the joy she takes in carnage barely scratches the surface of how devastating she can be. Not for the damage she can cause you, but for the damage she can make you cause _yourself_.

“If he’s amenable,” you tell her the next night, “I don’t see why not, my darling.” She hugs you, kisses you at the corner of your mouth--she must stretch to the tips of her toes to reach you--and if you ever feel this again for another, this strange tenderness, this borderline pity, then you will still consider her your first and finest creation, your dearest, your bright jewel, your Jade.


End file.
